Nam June
Paik: The Late Style
at Gagosian Gallery, Hong Kong
Gagosian
Hong Kong is pleased to present the first exhibition of Nam June Paik's work in
Hong Kong, following the announcement of the gallery's worldwide representation
of his estate.
Born in
Korea and living and working internationally, Paik brought television into the
realm of art for the first time and treated it as a tactile and multisensory
medium. Trained as a classical pianist, his early interests in composition and
performance combined with his radical aesthetic tendencies brought him into
contact with protagonists of the counter-culture and avant-garde movements of
the 1960s, including Fluxus. Such engagement profoundly shaped his outlook at a
time when electronic images were becoming increasingly present in everyday
life. He embraced new technologies as material parts of his repertoire, which
later included satellite transmissions, robots, and lasers. In 1974 Paik coined
the term “electronic superhighway” to describe the exponential growth of new
forms of communication. His installations, performances, and writings
contributed to the creation of a media-based culture that expanded the very
definition and aesthetic possibilities of making art.
Video
sculptures, paintings, and drawings produced during the last decade of Paik's
life, many of which have never been exhibited, will be presented together with
key works from the 1960s through the 1980s. The exhibition testifies to his
lifelong exploration of the role of technology in culture, including the
dissemination of infinite images via television. In TV Chair (1968), he
harnessed the closed-circuit capacities of video to engage the viewer. The
autobiographical installation 359 Canal Street (1991) comprises wall-mounted
television parts and a desk containing personal letters from Paik's friends
including Ray Johnson, Yoko Ono, and Fluxus founder George Maciunas; and
newspaper clippings on Paik's activities as an emerging artist in Europe.
After
suffering a stroke in 1996 at the age of sixty-four, Paik traveled less and
spent more time at his New York studio, where he revisited persistent themes
while tenaciously pursuing new ones. He continued to use the television as his
muse and canvas, marking monitors with fleeting brushstrokes; painting and
drawing abstractions that evoke transmissions gone awry; and engineering
technologically ambitious installations for major exhibitions at the Guggenheim
museums in New York (2000), Bilbao (2001), and Berlin (2004). In Candle TV
(1991–2003), a single lit candle stands in for electronic light inside the
shell of a television; while in Golden Buddha (2005), a carved Buddha figure
faces a screen displaying images of itself. In a series of brightly colored
canvases from 2005, Paik humanized schematic TVs with facial features, using
conventional painting materials to represent his signature subject and medium.
In these final years, he fused disparate elements from art, music, nature, and
technology into avant-garde bricolage.
Post a Comment